Designing for Cancer Survivorship
My background prior to starting graduate school was working in medical research and the internship I did this summer was on the design team at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). At the beginning of the summer, I had broad interest in working in three very different fields for my upcoming SVA IxD thesis project: improving patient experience in a healthcare context, blockchain accessibility and ideological siloing on social media. In largepart because I found my work at MSK this summer so rewarding, I’m pretty committed to pursuing a thesis project around cancer care. I’ve included my (very preliminary) thoughts on alternative projects at the end of this post.
This summer I worked at Memorial Sloan Kettering cancer center on a project around cancer survivorship. Understandably the hospital has focused extensively on the patient experience during diagnosis and treatment. My team there was tasked with exploring the patient experience and needs following treatment which is a period the hospital has historically focused less on.
With a team of three other interns I did extensive research into the state of survivorship care at MSK and identified several key problem areas. Synthesizing our interview findings, we devised guiding principles for designing for cancer survivors. Working from our research and these principles we prototyped concepts around improving peer to peer connection for survivors, acknowledging treatment milestones to make the transition to survivorship smoother and making more manageable the dissemination of information on care and ancillary services available to cancer survivors.
As our internship was coming to a close, we were invited to continue working on these problems or other ones within the MSK context for our upcoming senior theses at school. MSK was a wonderful place to work and improving cancer care and patient experience in general is meaningful. Throughout the summer, I made amazing connections to people within the institution, both within the design team and outside of it, so the possibility of continuing to work with them is very appealing. Additionally, I think it would greatly strengthen the outcome of my thesis to get feedback from MSK throughout the process. For these reasons I feel pretty certain I want to do my thesis project on cancer care in coordination with MSK.
The designs we proposed in our internship to help the survivorship experience were both physical and digital. I am interested in developing my digital skills so I would like to focus on a digital solution for my thesis. One of the digital solutions we prototyped and tested during the summer was an app, “MSK Thrive,” that provided survivors with daily care recommendations and to do lists customized to their specific diagnosis and treatment history. It was modeled after health tracking apps. This app served a specific purpose of allowing interested survivors to track their health progress and receive health recommendations from MSK.
Building upon this and thinking more holistically, a digital companion to aid patients in the transition to and experience of survivorship would be very valuable. If possible, thinking around ways to integrate and automate as much as possible the other functions of the hospital with any patient facing digital companion is also a need that emerged in discussions with doctors and patients at MSK.
Alternative Interests for Thesis:
Blockchain: Following new innovations in blockchain application is a hobby of mine. Projects like Ethreum are making the barrier of entry to build applications using blockchain much lower. I presume there are many design problems that are raised here. Opportunities to improve the user experience in understanding and taking advantage of blockchain technology are of great interest to me.
Social Media: An unintended and somewhat surprising consequence that seems to have emerged from the development of social media is the decreased exposure of people to beliefs contrary to their own. With the greater ability to customize the information you are exposed to, it is much easier to avoid oppositional thoughts. This exacerbates political polarization and probably has the effect of ideologies becoming more extreme in isolation. Thinking through ways design can mitigate this would be of deep personal interest.
